Best of 2025
Lacinia
Returning to Die Schachtel with his fourth full-length with the label, the Genoa born, Bologna based, guitarist and electroacoustic composer, Stefano Pilia, delivers “Lacinia”, a new, immersive cycle of compositions, delving deeper into the realm of metaphysical, spiritual, and divine meaning, weaving astounding arrangements of sonority from a palette of synths, strings, brass, organ, various electroacoustic instruments, and percussion. Resting at a refined intersection of the acoustic and elect…
When I sing, I slip into the microphone. Into that void, I bring comrade "prayers", then, turning to face the outside, together we explode
Like on the early solo Haino album that shares the group’s name (released on P.S.F. in 1993), the instrumentation swims in reverb (the use of which Akiyama recalls as ‘a kind of point of the band’), often obscuring the instrumental sources. On the short opening piece, a distant reed instrument arcs long buzzing melodies over a bed of cymbals and gongs, like a psychedelic take on Tibetan music. The epic second part, occupying almost 50 minutes, begins as a splayed, near-formless cloud of electric…
The Yellow Box
As trans-Atlantic alchemists pulling from a shared dialectic that somehow encompassed both postmodern deconstructionist tendencies and a delightfully subversive sense of poptimism, it’s easy to see how David Cunningham and Peter Gordon immediately hit it off upon initially meeting each other back in the late-1970s at the height of their youthful transgressions. Having initially worked together on the second Flying Lizards’ LP fourth wall, with its ingenious fusion of dismantled rhythms and rearr…
Spilla
Black Truffle is thrilled to announce Spilla, the second album from Nantes-based Ensemble Nist-Nah, 48 minutes of music for Gamelan, drum kits, wood and metal percussion instruments, and plucked strings that will surely count as one of the most electrifying records you hear this year. Founded by the Australian drummer/percussionist Will Guthrie in 2019, continuing the explorations begun in solo form on Nist-Nah (Black Truffle, 2020), the ensemble (eight or nine core members with occasional guest…
Melopea
Super tip! Black Truffle is pleased to announce Melopea, presenting two new pieces highlighting the incredible voice of Amelia Cuni (1958-2024), the great Italian singer, based in Berlin in later life, whose mastery of the classical Indian dhrupad developed in parallel with a commitment to contemporary experimental approaches. After two stunning archival releases documenting traditional dhrupad performances in India in the 1990s (BT079 and BT092), the two side-long pieces here embody the freedom…
Static Disposal
Legendary 1976 Private Press Rarity Documents Oklahoma's most uncompromising Proto-Punk visionaries, this trio produced art-damaged outsider rock influenced by Stooges, Beefheart, and Velvet Underground
A Grammar for Listening
2008. Paris and Glasgow. Eric La Casa recording sounds for Luke Fowler's 16mm triptych. Not compositions but investigations into the infra-ordinary - that space-time at low intensity where background noise meets the inaudible. How to create a meaningful dialogue between looking and listening? This question drove Fowler's film cycle. La Casa's answer: find a listening point in relation to everything taking place. The microphones amplify all living substances in motion - from the interior of the b…
Defiant Jazz: a Joe McPhee Taster
From the viral Severance TV dance party to spiritual jazz explorations, this vinyl compilation spans five decades of the Poughkeepsie legend's most electrifying moments. Funky grooves, cosmic transcendence, and raw improvisation collide.
Errant Ear
The legendary electroacoustic composer presents her most intimate work yet, weaving five decades of sonic memories into a profound meditation on time, perception, and the treasures of lived experience
Early Works
Bill Fontana investigates the physics of perception itself. Side A: tape collages where sound becomes both material and force. Side B: Wave Spiral for 5 Rin Gongs - a sidelong, 21-minute centerpiece where pure sine waves create interference patterns, frequency made sculptural. Sound spiraling through space, dissolving boundaries between observer and phenomenon.
Star Rover
Visionary Walter Maioli and electronic innovator John Zandijik’s 1980s late-night sessions fuse ancient flutes and cutting-edge technology, creating a cosmic soundscape that bridges ethnomusicology, psychedelia, and electronic experimentation.
Match / Soliloque 1&4 / Antifonia
Nicolae Brînduş's Match / Soliloque 1&4 / Antifonia reissues the composer’s most eccentric works from the PHTORA cycle (1968-1972), blending collective improvisation, spectral tradition, Romanian folklore, and free jazz into a mesmerizing tapestry. Tape manipulations and reverberation add depth, while Ana Golici’s sleeve art captures the album’s vivid sensibility.
What We Do When in Silence
Huge Tip! * Limited edition of 300 copies, Embossed cover, comes with insert and postcard * Killer record here! Three Italian heavyweights doing what they do best - radical improvisation that sits somewhere between electronics, silence, and pure Mediterranean mystery. This is the real deal. Nicola Ratti, Alessandra Novaga, and Enrico Malatesta - three names you need to know if you're serious about contemporary improvised music.
The sound? Imagine if AMM had been born in Southern Europe with lapt…
Traveling Light
From out of the dark, the crackle of feed back birdsong signals a return to the land of sound environments exclusive to the music of Rafael Toral. A year and a half after his epochal electric guitar album, Spectral Evolution, Traveling Light finds him sharpening his focus, moving boldly from abstract forms to concrete compositions in the form of a set of jazz standards. Based on Toral’s discography, this may seem an unlikely endeavor, but happily, Traveling Light transpires to be one of the majo…
Min Bul
VERY LAST COPIES - Gold Vinyl, edition of 100. We are pleased to announce the upcoming reissue of “Min Bul”, a milestone of Norwegian rock and jazz, included in the renowned Nurse With Wound list, from the band whose leader was a young Terje Rypdal. Recorded in the Rosenborg studio in September 1970, with Egil Eide as engineer, “Min Bul” is a highly experimental work for its time that grew out of the Samklang projects at the Henie-Onstad Art Center, where director Ole Henrik Moe encouraged adven…
Continuation
A cascading piano improvisation by Xiu Xiu's Hyunhye Seo, recorded live during a Nam June Paik exhibition in Turin. On Side B, Japanese avant-garde pioneer Phew reinterprets Seo's performance into a new electronic landscape. Music as surrender, dialogue between performer, space and the present moment.
So Far
CD Digipack. Wümme, Lower Saxony. 1972. A converted schoolhouse. Inside: a tangle of cables, reel-to-reel machines, custom electronics soldered together by hands that refused manuals. This was not a professional recording studio. This was Faust's laboratory—and So Far was the experiment that proved you could rewire rock music's circuitry without killing the patient. Six months earlier, Faust had released their self-titled debut—a savage dismantling of what a rock album could be. Tape edits slice…
Trabant II
With less than a year having passed since their incredible and widely celebrated, first-ever collection dedicated to the 1980s, Hungarian countercultural music collective Trabant, purge.xxx builds upon the momentum and its intoxicating highs with ‘Trabant II’, their second deep dive into clandestine, previously unissued recordings by the band. Meticulously culled from the collectively’s vast archive of DIY cassettes — capturing politically urgent expressions at the junctures of post-punk, synth …
Trabant Bundle
** Special Discounted Bundle ** The complete archival collection of Hungary's legendary underground collective Trabant (1980-1987), preserved by Purge in two essential volumes. Active behind the Iron Curtain during the harshest years of authoritarian communism, this loose collective of songwriters and filmmakers - including Mihály Víg, János Vető, György Kozma, and Marietta Méhes - created hundreds of DIY recordings that were hand-traded on cassettes within the Hungarian underground.
Described a…
A Question of Silence / Broken Mirrors
Purge.xxx unveils hidden gems of Dutch experimental cinema with the first ever release of Lodewijk de Boer & Martijn Hasebos' synthesiser soundtracks that have remained hidden in the vaults for over four decades. The centerpiece of this historic release is the collaborative score between Lodewijk de Boer (longtime collaborator of avant-garde filmmaker Frans Zwartjes) and Martijn Hasebos for Marleen Gorris' explosive 1982 debut film “A Question of Silence”, alongside de Boer's solo score for Gorr…